12 comments:

Ewwwe - I would never have anything so pedestrian, middle class and tacky as flowers or forests depicted on my walls.

I do have a couple of arty shots though, one of a really nice swamp, and the other a bare tree off in the distance, all on it's own in the middle of no where, or maybe in the middle of a ghost town. Bob Brown would hate them.

'Bonded to nature' is bad enough. (I'm waiting for him to come out with the other cliches, 'we are a part of nature' and 'we need to reconnect with nature'. Throw those three cliches in a room together and see what happens!)

A bit later he comes out with a truly vomitous passage: 'Long ago I ceased to believe in religious dogma. What I do see is the continual unfolding of the human spirit, or consciousness, and an awareness greater than that in any other creature on earth. The universe, through us, is evolving towards experiencing, understanding and making choices about its future. We are the universe thinking.'

As anthills to ants, wombat burrows to wombats, dungballs to dungbeetles, so are six-lane highways and art deco apartment blocks and traffic lights to humans. The idea that human manufactures are *not* natural is bollocks.

That said, Bob Brown looks like a cockerspaniel. For this, I would forgive him a multitude of inanities.

Even the Romantics, with their penchant for swooning over trees and their fondness for solitude, didn't mind cities and development all that much. Think Coleridge's 'Stately pleasure dome' and Wordsworth's lines on Westminster. It's a gross injustice to the romantics to presume that all they did was write 'environmental' poems in the modern sense.

Some politicians in their books and essays are able to get away from partisan politics, and leave their ideologies to one side, but the great disappointment of Bob's book is that he is just unable to do this. It's not that we don't get a chance to see the human side of Bob; it's just that when we do see his human side, it's realising that this could be all there is too the man - bitter partisan rivalry.

You should both like the Talking Heads song (Nothing but)Flowers. If you have never heard it, the lyrics are at http://tinyurl.com/youhfp

I don't think it got much airplay at the time the record came out.

It's a very lovely and oddball song, and I am sure I heard David Byrne say in an interview that he wasn't being ironic; he is very open to people seeing the good in everything from shopping malls to nature. (This was the attitude behind his mildly amusing movie "True Stories". I like the album more than the movie perhaps.)

I wrote a really fab comment last night, all about the awe inspiring wonders and beauty of the human-made world. But the verifier didn't work, and I didn't notice, and then I noticed just long enough to see my comment vanish into the ether when I closed the tab.